two honks and he is risen
in the living room from a couch more comfortable than you’d expect.

she cascades across the street in an ivory bathrobe
playing in the sunshine like a new year’s day float.

through the open front door on it comes :
the scent of morning glory on the breeze.

a row of drumsticks itching to be bbq’d
sunbathing in the window— thaw.

blinds cracked, do the dishes, vacuum the floor, brew the coffee;
skillet, eggs, sausage : home.

---

Hailing from South Central, Los Angeles, Tauwan Patterson is a Black + Queer Poet and recent graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. His work has appeared in online literary magazines Cool Beans Lit, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Muse-Pie Press’ Shot Glass Issue #41, the Rising Phoenix Review, The Amazine, University of Baltimore’s Welter Literary Journal, and JMWW, and will also appear in the forthcoming Moonstone Arts Center anthology Which Side Are You On?!, With his poetry Tauwan aims to, in the words of the great Poet and Thinker Marcus Jackson, announce his freedom and presence. Making a sound that echoes in the end that says Tauwan Patterson. No more. No less.

I put a little of myself
into everything I cook
Mom says, making bread
on the formica kitchen table

I watch her stretch and fold the dough
her hands push and roll the spongy mass
that reminds me of her belly
pasty and deflated by motherhood
she pinches off a small ball
and pops it into my mouth

I smoosh the slightly sour glob
between my tongue and the roof
of my mouth savour the yeasty treat
she pats my protruding stomach
and leaves a smudge of flour
soft as baby powder on my apron

when I realize particles of her skin
have been incorporated into the dough
each time she kneads it. I stop
mid-chew but can’t spit it out swallow
the gift and allow it to nourish me

is this why she has shrunk?
have we been gnawing away
at her all these years?
how many loaves before she disappears?

---

Angelle McDougall is neurodivergent and a graduate of The Writers’ Studio program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has poems published in Rattle Magazine and Wordplay at Work Magazine. Some of her other work can be found online at angellemcdougall.com.

and the woman who sold them wore a thick sweater
buttoned in the middle of 90 degree heat.
But we didn’t notice, reaching for the salt shaker
on the counter then opening our mouths wide to the boiled
and baked dough, once a gold field of grain
now enclosing cream cheese pinked by lox.
We sucked the dough before it stuck
to the roof of the mouth,
then ran back on streets wide enough
to nourish birches planted before foundations
were metered and bricks laid.
The heat always stayed, metal to touch. The earth welcomed us
squawking raw and sweet
from finches overhead.
Our cousins said to us, You have no accent
at these Jersey reunions with great aunts and uncles
who left Poland and the Ukraine. Like Tessie
who in her Queens apartment stayed up until 3 a.m. baking rugelach
and in an upstate cabin each summer served us kasha varnishkas
loaded with butter. I knew her sisters sold
their wedding rings to bring her over.
Yet for us the war had been replaced by Hogan’s Heroes,
the same way a remnant onion
on a sesame bagel called
backwards, the same way we didn’t consider
the bagel woman
and how her accent
betrayed everything she escaped.

---

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Shore, Mom Egg Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Salon.

At a time like this
smoke drifts across the road
a few bars of harmonica
flit through the gusts of conversation.

You are no longer alive.

A very young waiter
serves me, proudly, a slice of pie.

This is a small celebration
of our rediscovered love
of your face looking up
gaunt and old from the pillow.

You always liked your pie.

How handsome you grew as the moment neared!
– the moment when something in you decided
it was time to give up on breath.

Old and yet young, vulnerable
haggard – debonair –
at last your face held all of you:
we couldn’t look away.

The conversations eddy in here;
the lemon aftertaste of the pie grows sour –
the flavour of mortality.

You made and marred me;
you muddled along, as we all do
and today, lying cold
waiting for the fire
still you lead the way.

---

Kai Jensen was born in Philadelphia but moved with his family to New Zealand when he was five. He married an Australian, is now an Australian citizen, and lives and writes at Wallaga Lake, on the Far South Coast of New South Wales,with kangaroos in the garden. Kai’s poetry has appeared sporadically in Australasian literary journals including Landfall, Sport, PoetryNZ, Takahe, Southerly, Westerly and Overland, and also in Rattle.

What do you hunger for?
The you who answers to your name,
all 30 trillion human cells of you,
is also the you made of 39 trillion
bacteria, virus, and fungi microbes
–all enough of a who to influence
how you sleep, how you feel,
and what you want to eat.

Choose a dish for all
of your yous to enjoy, maybe
a brightly glazed ceramic plate
or hand turned wooden bowl
or the thrift store find you love.

Your salad’s base might be
greens or other vegetation.
Its body might include
grains, meats, fruits, more vegetables.
Its garnish might be seeds, nuts, herbs,
maybe something pickled for tang.

Dress it to unify everything,
the way your skin cleverly holds in
all the stick and goo you call you.
You might toss this with your hands
for a brief sensory thrill in this time
when thrills are expensive.

Or you might arrange your salad’s
ingredients in different zones
of your bowl, each forkful
choreography for your mouth to enjoy.
After all, you are eating fellow life forms
who themselves once enjoyed eating
sunshine or sunshine’s yield in the nearly
endless circle of life eating life eating life

that will end, on this planet, some
four billion years from now
so go ahead, toss on extra cheese
and hum a little tune as you do,
singing to all of your multitudes.

---

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Learn more about Laura at lauragraceweldon.com 

from the last of our bees
requires a spoon long and strong
enough to scrape a final huddled
glow from the jar’s corner. Gold
turned to crystal, gold flickered
with pollen’s memory of blossoms,
gold of real wealth in a time when
real, isn’t. A single worker bee makes
about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey
in her short steadfast lifetime. Now
our hives are silent. I lift the spoon
to waiting mouths of our youngest
family members, each in turn says
ewww at the taste and I damn
the river of regret coursing through me,
smile instead at faces unaccustomed
to such sweet intensity. I refuse
for now, to consider all they face.

---

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Learn more about Laura at lauragraceweldon.com.

I don’t want to go to Hell when I die,
to be dead and still be suffering and
not only suffering but suffering
worse than when I was alive, well, that’s not
good but in Heaven where the Afterlife
is supposed to be painless if not pain
-free there’s suffering of an
-other sort, I guess, too much blessedness
up yonder, sweetness and light and all those
things associated with God maybe
because He invented ’em, but there’s no

third choice is what I’m taught in church and Sun
-day School, you can’t die and live forever
on Earth, you have to bail out when you’re croaked
and if you’re good you get the Good Place and
if you’re bad the Bad, I guess it depends
as well on if you believe that Jesus
is the Son of God Who was crucified
for our sins, etc., everyone

knows the story, He who has ears to hear
let him hear and so on and the point is
you’d better hear what you’re being told in
the sense that even if you don’t buy it
it’s so anyway, that’s how things are at
our church, plus they get my allowance,
twenty percent of it, I only get
a buck, they score two dimes of that, I name
those Adam and Eve and I kick ’em out

of the paradise of my pocket, pinch
each with thumb and finger, drop ’em in and
somehow they multiply though they subtract
me in a sense but what more can you ask of
sin? So after Sunday School I walk to
the Korn Dawg King for a free Fanta
because they honor my church bulletin
which is more than I can say for me, sad
to say, I don’t have much mammon, it’s like
drinking blood without eating the body
so I have a scrambled egg when I get home,
Man does not live by bread alone but it

sure as Hell helps, but all in all I’m set
for another week of sin surviving
me, ha ha. Next week we’ll try the root beer.

---

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in fourteen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine. Gale now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

After supper with my parents I go
next door from the buffeteria to
the drug store to look at the comic books.
It’s 1965. They’re twelve cents each.
Georgia sales tax is four cents on the buck
so I can buy two books for a quarter,
which is my weekly allowance. I want
the Justice League of America and
the Legion of Super-Heroes because
I get more costumed crimefighters for my
money. My father’s money, I should say.
I’ll meet my folks in front of the Rich’s
department store, by the fountain, facing
the parking lot. Our car’s out there somewhere,
waiting like a loyal beast of burden
to take us home, a few miles away, to

Marietta. When we arrive I jump
out from the back seat, open the garage
door, stand to one side, and watch my parents
roll in. Father closes the door and we
go into the house–we never lock up–
and then he takes off his suit and tie and
dress shoes–he’s a principal and looks sharp
when he’s out in public. Mother
reads, or watches TV, while Father tunes
the radio to the Braves baseball game
and sits on the porch, studying traffic. 
I wait until he settles. Turn it up,
Son, he says. Sometimes he says, Turn it down.
When it’s just the way he wants it, I leave
for my bedroom, in the attic. It’s my

Fortress of Solitude, my parents too
tired, usually, to walk the thirteen
steps up to it–when they want me, they shout
from the bottom of the stairway. Tonight,
however–Friday night–they don’t need me,
only each other. Saturday nights, too.

Father might ask me to fine-tune the Braves.
Mother might ask me to turn the channel
or clean her glasses or bring her a snack.
I’m a good boy and I’m eager to please.
I do what they ask and they let me be.
Then I go upstairs again and read how

good defeats evil, which it always does,
just in different ways from month to month.
I’m too young to know that evil wins, too,
at least its share and probably more–that’s
for grownups to worry about. Good wins
as I look at the pictures and read and

turn a page, then the next. Not that good
doesn’t take its lumps from evil. Not that
evil doesn’t make a contest of it
–that’s what makes life interesting, and church
on Sunday a necessity: to thank
God for what we have though we don’t have it

but always pray we do. Well, some of it
we have. But others don’t–poor folks, for one,
and if they don’t have it, we don’t, either.
Food enough, I mean, and heat in Winter.
Steady jobs and good clothes. Enough money
for Christmas. We have all of these but if

someone else doesn’t then neither do we.
If I were the Flash I’d be quick enough
to run around the world, our neighborhood,
at least, and count all the people in need.
If I were Superboy I’d see them all
with my X-ray vision. But I’m just me

so I fight evil the usual way,
by putting coins in the collection plate
(but not my comics-money–I get some
special from my parents for charity) and going to Sunday School and praying.
But all those people praying all those prayers
hasn’t ended poverty and sadness

–perhaps they don’t pray hard enough. As I
walk home from church I’m feeling older. Guess

I’ll have to wait for Jesus to return
before life’s perfect. Still, I’d like to think
that we do what we can. In this issue

of my life there’s a happy ending but
not so happy that my life’s been cancelled
like a magazine that doesn’t sell well.
There’s just enough unhappiness so that
I want to keep up with the adventure
in this comic book which God wrote and drew
from start to finish and Doom reads every day.

---

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in fourteen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine. Gale now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

“Is it worse to be someplace awful when you’re by yourself,
or someplace really nice that you can’t share with anyone?”

This is where Theseus ditched Ariadne.
Jump-cut to sweating slabs of feta, to squids
dangling on clotheslines. His lanky frame in
bleached-out blue jeans

practically draining into the horizon.
Rakı going milky in a tall glass of
melting ice. In one version of the story
Ariadne marries

Dionysus—her wine-dark loneliness lit
up with a single sip. Olives green as eyes,
dry bougainvillea flowers like fingernails
over cobblestones.

Others say that no one ever came and she
hung herself. Cue the tomatoes, a gliding
knife: golden hour gilding the scene as Tony
shakes oil from a glass

bottle, preparing a feast as if someone
else might enter the frame. As if it doesn’t
end with him eating alone on a terrace
staring out to sea.

---